Trump has gotten to the point where his defenders can’t defend him anymore. It started out as fun when it was just insulting a well-qualified woman. Now they’ve lost the plot.

They can’t keep up with all the controversies they have to jerk their knee to. They’re still arguing about not wearing masks and now they have to defend Trump for letting Putin put a price on the heads of American soldiers?

They go to his rallies to relive the “Lock Her Up” glory days, instead they get *14 minutes* of excuses about him walking tenuously down a ramp like an overweight septuagenarian with declining health, which they can all see he is.

They can go back to calling everything fake news, but they have a problem with writing off 120,000 deaths, even if they don’t acknowledge it. Suddenly it’s not made up—it’s just not all Trump’s fault, is all.

His supporters, they’ll never turn against him, not as much out of loyalty, but out of deep shame of admitting they were wrong about something—anything. (Of course we know how easy and liberating it is admit we know better and didn’t know as much before.) They’ll just fall quiet.

I used to think that there was this center of middle-of-the-road voters, that would vacillate from Republican to Democrat and back. Now I think it may be that there are really just two sides, and rather than switch support, some just sit out elections if they’re not fired up.

It shouldn’t take unfathomable death tolls, a depression, and a pandemic to get you to do your minimal civic obligation. But the reality is, way more people are motivated to vote by their racism than they are by their financial concerns—even by their patriotism.